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Patient Safety Academy announces 2013 Rising Tide Award recipients

Posted September 4, 2013

The Patient Safety Academy has announced the recipients of the inaugural Rising Tide Award, which recognizes individuals or organizations who have demonstrated outstanding achievement and commitment to best practices in patient safety. Recipients of the 2013 Rising Tide Award include: Linda Brady of Maine Medical Center; Kathy Day of Maine Quality Counts; and Douglas Salvador of Maine Medical Center

Linda Brady, BSN, RN, of Scarborough serves in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) at Maine Medical Center (MMC). Brady recently led an interdisciplinary NICU Central Line Committee to review central line practices at MMC as compared to practices at other institutions. She ensured that all nurses, nurse practitioners, and providers were trained in accurate and complete documentation for central line practices. Overall, Brady’s work has contributed to a nonexistent rate of central line blood stream infections at the MMC NICU. She has served as a driving force in determining best practices and educating staff to provide evidence-based care of patients with central lines in the NICU.

Kathy Day, RN, of Bangor is a patient safety activist and advocate and currently serves as a consumer representative for the Maine Quality Counts Consumer Advisory Council, where she works to transform health and healthcare in Maine. In her work as an activist, she has initiated several patient safety campaigns and has advocated for hundreds of individual patients at the national, regional, and state level. Day is an affiliate of the Consumer’s Union Safe Patient Project and Northeast Voices for Error Reduction (NEVER) and volunteers with the Maine Critical Access Hospital Patient Safety Collaborative.

Douglas Salvador, MD, MPH, of Cape Elizabeth serves as vice president of quality and patient safety at Maine Medical Center, where he leads the Center for Performance Improvement and efforts to strengthen performance improvement, quality, patient satisfaction, and patient safety. Salvador has worked tirelessly to promote a culture of patient safety both at MMC and throughout health organizations in the state, recently teaching a team training program to more than 3500 Maine health care team members, residents, and students. His leadership and dedication to patient safety have contributed to the State of Maine being recognized as a leader in delivering safe, high quality care.

The Rising Tide Awards will be presented on Sept. 13 at 3:15 p.m. after the closing session of the 2013 Patient Safety Academy, which will be held on the University of Southern Maine Portland campus. The Patient Safety Academy, organized by staff at the USM Muskie School of Public Service and sponsored by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention Rural Health and Primary Care Program, provides knowledge- and skill-building workshops for health care professionals from Maine hospitals, physician practices, pharmacies, long-term care facilities, agencies, organizations, and advocacy groups. The 2013 academy plenary speaker is Jonathan Welch, MD, MSc, instructor of medicine at Harvard and attending emergency physician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Welch is the author of the recent Health Affairs article, “As She Lay Dying: How I Fought to Stop Medical Errors from Killing My Mom.”